It was only a matter of time.

Payment processor Square announced a partnership with Coinbase last night that will allow its merchants on Square Market to accept payments in bitcoins.

If this announcement had come a year ago, we might have suspected it was an April Fool’s Day joke, but so quickly does the payments world move that now accepting bitcoins is far from shocking.

Stripe also recently announced that it is beta-testing bitcoin acceptance for its merchants. (Perhaps the more important if less buzzy news in Stripe’s recent announcement was that it is also testing Automated Clearing House or ACH transactions.) Several payments startups are also working bitcoin acceptance into their systems.

Square describes the buying process on its site in this way:

Let’s dive into the technical details of checking out. When a buyer opts to “Pay with Bitcoin” we first generate a new Bitcoin address and attach it to the order. We will continually monitor this address throughout the checkout process so we know when it has received payment.

Next, the buyer submits their payment. Buyers with a mobile Bitcoin wallet, simply open their wallet and scan the QR code to load the transaction details. Those with a hosted Bitcoin wallet receive instructions for entering the required information.

Once the payment details are loaded into the buyer’s wallet, they submit their payment to the network. Next, we detect that our receiving address was successfully funded and automatically advance the buyer to the order confirmation page. It’s pretty magical to witness first-hand!

Keeping it simple for the seller, the seller receives the amount of the purchased goods or services in USD and in the amount of USD advertised to the sellers’ customer at the time of transaction, so the seller takes no risk on Bitcoin value fluctuations. The seller then fulfills their customer’s order. Seamless!

Bitcoin acceptance is often viewed as a marketing ploy by industry watchers. “Given the relatively low usage of bitcoin compared to any other form of payment vehicle,” said Nick Holland, senior payments analyst for Javelin Strategy & Research, “I’d say that this is more to do with Square being newsworthy rather than having any significant revenue value for them.”

Another way to put it is that accepting bitcoins is still a differentiator for processors, rather than being table stakes. The elephant in the online payments room is PayPal. The eBay subsidiary has made some positive noise about accepting bitcoins, but has made no move yet.

Coinbase raised $25 million in a Series B round in December 2013. Andreessen Horowitz led the funding, which is believed to be the largest round ever raised by a Bitcoin startup.

The value of bitcoins is not doing as well as red-hot Coinbase. The average price of 1 bitcoin hit a low of around $450 this week, its lowest level in about six months. Bitcoin’s drop in value can be traced to the failure of several exchanges, most notably Mt.Gox, as well as the IRS’s recent rule changes regarding taxation of bitcoin transactions.